On 09.11.2008, at 16:25, Ian G wrote:
Eddy Nigg wrote:
Now I'm interested in getting rid of self-signed certificates if
possible. They undermine "legitimate" certificates and put the
majority of users under an unneeded risk. That's one of my goals
today!
It seems that Eddy and Nelson are in the anti-self-signed-certs
camp, and I would join Kyle in the pro-self-signed-certs camp.
Do others have strong-enough feelings? I'm searching for a way here
to show one side or the other which way the wind is blowing.
I'm in the camp of giving the user an option to make her own trust
decisions - be it self signed or CA certificates.
And in the camp of tearing down the current business model of "trust"
on the internet.
Pre-made decisions which is the 'we decide which is best for you' in
the form of 'trusted root certificates' and 'go away, you get killed'
style dialogs on unknown root certs in Firefox are bad.
For example, in Estonia we could choose to get a business registrar
verified certificate for a web service that targets Estonian ID-card
holders, so it could be a nice closed loop: national CA, national CA
issued client certificates on the smart card, national CA issued and
verified web server certificate.
But we run with 20$ domain verified godaddy and see no difference and
the key here is that our users see no difference either. They don't
care if the address bar turns red or green or purple, if it doesn't
nag then it's OK. In our case the decision to trust our system is
based on other factors than the certificate.
I believe that "fixing" broken PKI with EV certs and such is a dead
end (yet a good money maker for some) and it has little to do with
giving better trust decision making options to the end user.
Currently there are two (generalized) options for an average joe: have
no control over trust decisions made based on certificates (the ~50
pre-defined CAs in authority list built into firefox make the
decision), or be scared the hell out with the
'add trust exception' (why not 'add explicit trust').
--
Martin Paljak
http://martin.paljak.pri.ee
+372.515.6495
_______________________________________________
dev-tech-crypto mailing list
dev-tech-crypto@lists.mozilla.org
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-tech-crypto
